Monday, January 04, 2016

Sherlock: The Abominable Bride

“It doesn’t make sense, Sherlock. Because it’s not real.”

In the second collection of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Musgrave Ritual” features an
opening that has intrigued fans of the series — and in particular, Sherlock showrunners Mark Gatiss and
Steven Moffat — for years. As Watson is rummaging through some of Holmes’s old
files, he begins asking him about early cases that Holmes worked on before he
even knew Watson. As Holmes replies, it’s clear that not all of the cases were solved.

“They are not all successes, Watson,” said
he. “But there are some pretty little problems among them. Here’s the record of
the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, and the
adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminum
crutch, as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his
abominable wife.”

Moffat and Gatiss have made use of the case
of the aluminum crutch twice in the series thus far, as people first meeting
Sherlock have praised him on his earlier successes, “especially that one about
the aluminum crutch,” and now they move to the last case he mentions. Because
Holmes never mentions it further in the story, it gives the two writers a clean
slate with which to write their own story on it, while squeezing it into the
already existing storyline and serving to explore Sherlock’s mind palace much
further.

And as a result, we get “The Abominable
Bride,” the first new episode of Sherlock
since January 2014. And it was brilliant.

As I illustrated at length in my book Investigating Sherlock: The Unofficial Guide (ECW Press, 2015), Sherlock’s mind palace had become quite convoluted in season
three. There’s a lot going on there, and with the continued attempts to bring
out Sherlock’s humanity, it’s jumbled his previously ordered mind palace to the
extent that where in season one he would simply zip in there, grab the piece of
information he needed, and get back out — so on the outside it appears
that he was just trying to remember something — by season three he was becoming
trapped within its rooms, finding things that brought him solace, putting people
he loved into the individual rooms so he could have therapy sessions with them
in there to help him sort things out. The reason? Before, the mind palace
stored all of the intellectual information he needed to solve cases. Now, it
contains the emotions that help him
understand the cases much better, but which also complicate things enormously.

I loved the opening of this episode, where
we got a “Previously on Sherlock”
montage that, at first, looked like the writers’ clever “nyah-nyah” opening
that served only to remind us that we’ve only gotten three episodes every two
years. But after seeing the episode, I realized that every clip in that opening
would come up again in the episode, so it was brilliantly done. And then, we’re
told, “Alternatively...” and the timeline rushes back to the 1880s, where John
is fighting in the second Afghan War, which is exactly how Doyle’s book, A Study in Scarlet, opens.

As I mentioned in my book, their first
meeting is reenacted in the first Sherlock
episode, “A Study in Pink,” but Sherlock is more standoffish than in the book,
where instead he’s hopping around with delight at some finding and is actually
quite pleasant and friendly. And so, to show that difference, the writers give
us a slightly different meeting, one more in keeping with the book version
(he’s not exactly friendly in the conventional sense, but at least smiles).
Just as A Study in Scarlet opens with
Watson’s memories of the devastating Afghan War, John’s voiceover quotes
directly from the opening of the novel to convey the same nightmares: “The
second Afghan War brought honours and promotion to many. But for me, it meant
nothing but misfortune and disaster.” Where in “A Study in Pink,” we simply see
the nightmares, with no voiceover from John, this is more in keeping with
Watson’s more objective way of writing about his experiences (even though, as
Gatiss and Moffat have explored in the series, one need only read between the
lines to realize just how subjective Watson’s writing really is). The next few
lines are also taken from the novel, and he meets Stamford again, and they go
to the Criterion bar (in “A Study in Pink,” they changed it to the Criterion
coffee shop), and then leave to meet Sherlock.

Now we fast-forward. John’s new
story on Sherlock, “The Blue Carbuncle,” has just come out, and it’s already a
big seller. In case you missed the reference, “The Adventure of the Blue
Carbuncle” was a story set at Christmas, just as this one is, thus fulfilling
this episode’s designation as a Christmas special. (Incidentally, for Doctor Who fans, it’s also a story about
a rare and invaluable gem that’s hidden inside a Christmas goose. I wonder if
rereading that story gave Moffat his idea for the Doctor’s Christmas
special...)

From there the episode follows what seems
to be a traditional narrative, with the whodunit followed by Sherlock’s
bafflement and ultimately him solving the case. But before we get to the
loopiness of the time-shifting that begins to happen two-thirds of the way
through the story, let’s discuss the wonderful overarching theme of this
episode.

Ever since the series began, people have
wondered aloud why Moffat and Gatiss chose to set the series in the 21st
century rather than surrounding the characters with Doyle’s gaslight and hansom
cab world of Victorian London, as most of the adaptations have done. In this
episode, at least one of the reasons becomes clear: because in the present day,
the women are allowed to be far more powerful characters with more agency than
they were ever allowed in Doyle’s books. What sets Adler apart from other
villains? The fact that she’s a woman. The
Woman. Holmes was outwitted by a woman, and that’s something that stymies him
for the rest of his days. If Adler had been Ian Adler, it wouldn’t have been a
big deal at all.

In the stories, the female characters are
wives who have been wronged, or who are worried about the safety of their
husbands and come to the detective and his partner for help. Or it’s Mrs.
Hudson, who was so insignificant to Doyle himself that he accidentally called
her Mrs. Turner on an occasion (in the TV series, Mrs. Hudson refers to Marie
Turner as the landlady next door). Mary comes to Holmes and Watson as a
distraught daughter who intrigues both men with tales of treasure on the high
seas, and then marries Watson, where she becomes a silent character from that
point on who exists only in the background of stories before being quickly and
quietly killed off so Doyle didn’t have to concern himself with her anymore.
Every detective and mortician is male, as is every doctor and police officer,
which wasn’t chauvinism but simply a fact of its time. Women are the source of
many of the problems of the books, and perhaps the most intriguing of them — Ricoletti’s
abominable wife — is explained in the manner I already quoted above, never to
be mentioned again.

Let’s look at that word for a moment: abominable. It’s a pretty fantastic word
to begin with, and, perhaps because many of us grew up with the Rudolph
Christmas story, conjures up something monstrous with giant teeth. It’s an adjective
that seems far worse than “terrible” or “horrific.” Abominable suggests something we want to avoid altogether,
something that’s not just terrible, but abhorrent. The dictionary defines it as
something disgusting and revolting, and even has a moral repugnance attached to
it.

Ah, morality. That wonderful Victorian
concept that’s coming back with a vengeance. Everyone who’s ever spent half a
minute on Facebook now knows that everything
seems morally repugnant, mostly because we’ve just run out of other adjectives
to describe it so we’ve added a moral component to it. And in the Victorian
period, the worst kind of wife would have been one who was not only revolting
and disgusting, but morally repugnant.

Abominable.

So, why was Ricoletti’s wife so abominable?
Who knows? She just was. End of story. Now let’s move to this other case that I
once solved, Watson. All you need to know about that woman is that she was abominable.

But in this episode, Gatiss and Moffat hit
the pause button on that scene in Doyle’s short story and say wait a minute:
Why was she so abominable? And they
come up with an explanation for how that could have been, but in doing so they
turn the case into an exploration of how women must have felt at the time,
being so marginalized. Mary’s a fascinating character in The Sign of Four when she comes to Holmes and Watson with all of
these stories about the fabled Agra treasure. Now she’s a non-person, having to
dress up just to sneak her way into their offices. Compare that to the 21st
century Mary Watson, who is secretly a super-spy and is welcomed in their
office, often helping them with their cases. (Interestingly, even in Victorian
London, Mycroft seems ahead of his time and uses Mary to assist him on a case.)
When Mary stands up angrily after everyone leaves her behind and announces to
Lestrade that she’s “part of a campaign” to allow women to vote, he stupidly
asks, “Are you for or against?” For the men at the time, the suffragette
movement was a political discussion they could discuss objectively. For the
women, it was an absolute necessity. Before the vote, they were silenced and
unable to work, vote, or have an opinion. After the vote, they had a say. And a
say can change everything.

When Mrs. Hudson expresses her displeasure
that in John’s stories she never utters a word, he tells her that her
“function” in the stories is to open doors and let them into their rooms.
Which, in Doyle’s stories, is all she ever does. He adds that the rooms are so
drab and dingy because the illustrator is “out of control”! (A reference to the
fact that it was an illustrator who put the deerstalker and cape on Holmes, not
Doyle himself.)

Our dear, dear Molly Hooper is Yentl’ing
her way through the morgue, putting on a fake moustache and fooling no one but
Sherlock so that she’s able to accomplish a job that she’s eminently qualified
for, but not allowed to perform simply because of her sex. “It’s amazing what
one has to do to get ahead in a man’s world,” says the more observant John,
much to her chagrin.

It’s not that women don’t have a purpose,
mind you. When Mary asks John if she’s expected to just sit there, John says,
“Not at all, my dear. We’ll be hungry later.” John’s maid seems mildly amused
when he berates her for being unable to boil an egg or clean his shoes
properly, and he obliviously says, “If it wasn’t my wife’s business to deal
with the staff” — a life-fulfilling job for Mary if ever there was one — “I
would talk to you myself.” Interestingly, when the maid simply observes that he
and his wife don’t spend any time together anymore, John completely loses it,
telling her that she’s bordering on impertinence and infuriating him. Yet when
his male friend makes far more insulting observations, John simply stands there
and takes it. One could argue that the maid is his paid inferior, and therefore
is out of line saying what she says, but it also has everything to do with the
fact she’s a young woman. A male butler wouldn’t have caused the same ire in John.
“I shall have a word with my wife to have a word with you,” he says, before she
asks why he never mentions her in the stories and is promptly dismissed.

With the main theme of the episode firmly
established, Sherlock and John go to see Mycroft. As I mentioned in my book, in
the Doyle canon Mycroft is massive. His size and corpulence is mentioned in
Watson’s narrative every time they see him (which isn’t often), and therefore,
when the pencil-thin show co-creator Mark Gatiss decided to play the character,
they inserted on-running jokes of him constantly working out and watching what
he ate. For this episode, they decide to run with Doyle’s version of him — or, perhaps, Sherlock's mind palace version of him, see below — and
turn him into the Mr. Creosote character from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (I kept waiting for
him to ask for a bucket). When the older brother mentions a group they need to
be concerned about, John begins to list off every group he can think of — which
is basically any group of people united in a common interest — that
concerns him. (Again, it would seem the Victorian period, in this instance, is
a mirror of our own.) The third group he mentions is the suffragists. Mycroft,
once again showing how far ahead of them he is ideologically, says that if the
group is who he thinks they are, they are right, and we are wrong.

And that brings us to the case that
Sherlock is asked to look into, the one of Lady Carmichael and her husband,
Eustace. The case is loosely based on “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,”
which, if there’s any single case in the Sherlock Holmes canon, is one where
the women actually triumph over the men. In it, Eustace Brackenstall is dead
from the get-go, and Holmes and Watson go to the manor to investigate the
death. Holmes speaks to the wife and to her maid, and becomes suspicious. He
then finds a sailor, who tells Holmes that, years ago, before she was married,
Lady Brackenstall and he fell in love, but she ended up having to marry
Eustace, who was a brute. He beat her all the time and forced her to live in
fear. Years later, the sailor ran into the maid, who told him everything. The
three of them arranged for him to come into the house and kill Eustace
Brackenstall, and because no one would know the sailor’s connection to the
family, no one would be able to link the murder. Except for Holmes. Holmes and
Watson listen to the confession, and Holmes is sympathetic to the cause. He
promises the sailor that he has already given a very small hint to Scotland
Yard, but doubts that they’ll be able to follow it. If they haven’t figured out
the case in a year, they’ll drop it and he and Lady Brackenstall will be able
to live happily ever after. He looks at Watson and declares him the jury, and
says, having listened to the evidence, he needs to declare a verdict. Watson
simply looks at the sailor and says, “Not guilty.”

In the stifling Victorian era, where women
had very few rights, they were still considered property of their husbands, and
those husbands could do what they wished with their wives. So it’s a bold way
to end the story, suggesting that Lady Brackenstall had the right to kill her
husband to remove herself from his clutches. Showing how they are far ahead of
their time, Holmes and Watson declare that the woman should be allowed agency
to take her life into her hands and try to protect herself, no matter what it
takes.

While Eustace Carmichael isn’t as brutish
as his literary predecessor, he’s certainly no prize. He mocks his wife in the
morning by asking her if her morning will contain “a vigorous round of
embroidery? an exhausting appointment at the milliner?” She mentions later that
he keeps many secrets from her, and there are times when a physical brutality
is hinted at. He’s silenced only when an envelope arrives containing nothing
but orange seeds.

Now, here’s where the story incorporates a
second Doyle work. “The Five Orange Pips” is a story where a man receives the
same envelope Carmichael does in this episode. (The title of the story was
hinted at in “The Great Game,” when Moriarty texts Holmes the sound of the five
Greenwich pips, indicating something was about to happen.) Like Carmichael in
this episode, the man in Doyle’s story knows the meaning of the orange seeds
right away — it was a dire warning sent by the Ku Klux Klan, and when one
receives the pips, it means you’re going to die. I found it rather amusing when
I saw people on Twitter mocking the outfits of the secret society at the end of
the episode, wondering aloud if Moffat and Gatiss even noticed that they looked
like KKK outfits. Um... yes, they did notice. (Was it the right thing to do?
Probably not, because A) many people wouldn’t have gotten the reference because
they didn’t outright link the KKK to the pips in the story, and B) that’s a connection
that just doesn’t work, even if you try to explain it away by saying they’re
subverting the KKK by appropriating their garb and making it purple. But
anyway...)

The story continues, as does the mystery,
until suddenly... Moriarty is back, and we’re returned to the 21st century. As
Moriarty and Sherlock face off in 221B, the entire apartment begins to shake...
which, turns out, is actually the airplane turbulence of the plane that 2014
Sherlock is on. “It’s not the fall that kills you,” Moriarty tells Sherlock.
“It’s the landing.” The flight
attendant is the same woman who had previously been Lady Carmichael, and we
realize that everything we’d seen up to this point was actually Sherlock’s mind
palace. His brain took him to Victorian London — a “simpler” time, as we’re
often told (as long as you were a white male, we’re rarely told) — to try to
clear away the cobwebs and focus him on the case at hand. The shock of
Mycroft’s phone call at the end of “His Last Vow” pushed him so far into his
mind palace that he retrieved a case that was over 100 years old. And,
naturally, he had to turn himself and his friends into Victorians to help solve
it. The abominable bride came to life to kill again — just like Moriarty
appears to have. Both shot themselves in the back of the head. The bride sings
a creepy song — “Do not forget me” — as she creeps up on her victims;
Moriarty simply asks, “Didja miss me?” If Sherlock can solve the 1895 crime, he
believes he can figure out the present-day one.

Unfortunately, we discover in this episode
how he enters the deeper rooms of his mind palace: through copious use of illegal
drugs. Mycroft knows he’ll never quit, so he simply asks Sherlock to make a
list for him every time he does drugs, so he’ll know exactly what the medics
will need to pump out of him should the need arise.

And just as quickly as he was on the jet,
he’s back in 221B in 1895, where he leaves a flabbergasted 2014 John to face an
angry 1895 John. (The amount of illicit drugs in his system clearly made him
pass out.) Mary leads Sherlock and John to a cathedral, where a secret society
is involved in a ritual. This society turns out to be an underground network of
women who are joined in the common cause of righting the wrongs that have been
done to them and their sisters. Among them are Molly Hooper, John’s maid, and Janine
— the woman who, in 2014, is the one Sherlock tricked into thinking he was
marrying her just so he could break into Magnusson’s office (for us, that
episode happened two years ago, but for Sherlock, it was only a day or two
earlier). And then Moriarty pops back up again, and boop, we’re back in the
present-day again. Sherlock frantically digs up the long-dead body of Amelia
Ricoletti, only to fall back into the mind palace — where he’s perched on
the edge of the Reichenbach Falls, where the literary Holmes fell to his
“death” the first time in “The Final Problem.”

The scene that follows is fantastic — Andrew
Scott is at his maniacal best as Jim Moriarty, shouting in Sherlock’s face that
he’ll never be rid of him. Moriarty is no longer a person to Sherlock: he’s
that part of Sherlock’s personality that reminds him he can fail. He’s the part
that makes Sherlock constantly question who he is, whether or not he’s right,
who knows something better than he does. He’s that part of Sherlock that keeps
the great detective on a precipice, worried he’ll fall over at any moment, with
nothing but his doubt to accompany him. As Moriarty grabs Sherlock by the
lapels and tells him they must fall together — “it’s always just you and me!” —
there’s the sound of a gun cocking, and Sherlock is once again reminded that
it’s not always Sherlock and
Moriarty, but Sherlock and John. “That’s not fair, there’s two of you,”
Moriarty whines. “There’s always two of us,” John replies. “Don’t you read The Strand?”

Yes, there are always two of them. In the
novels and stories, and in the TV series. In the film and stage adaptations and
radio plays, in the pastiche novels and parodies. There are always two of them,
and there always will be. Victorian John asks what his counterpart is like, and
Sherlock replies, with a smirk, that he’s cleverer than he looks. And with
that, John kicks Moriarty over the edge, freeing Sherlock’s mind of that part
of him that doubts himself.

But now it’s time for Sherlock to wake up,
and to do so, he’ll swan-dive off the edge of the Reichenbach Falls, because he
always wakes up. “But how?” John asks. “Elementary, my dear Watson,” Sherlock
replies with a smile, saying the one line the literary Holmes never did.

Sherlock does wake up, on the plane, determined
to get to work to figure out what’s going on in England. As he storms
ungratefully past his brother — the petulant little brother he’s always
been — that constant look of concern washes over Mycroft’s face. He tells
John to take care of him, as he always does, and then turns to pick up the
pieces of the list of narcotics that his brother had written out for him.
Sherlock constantly argues with Mycroft and undermines him whenever he can, but
at the end of the day, Mycroft is once again picking up the pieces of
Sherlock’s life for him.

Moriarty is dead. Amelia Ricoletti had
completed her deception by having her head actually blown off, but her message
continued when other women took up the cause, donning the veil and pretending
to be her so they could find justice against the men who had wronged them.
Similarly, as Sherlock declares at the end of the episode, Moriarty is dead,
but that doesn’t mean his work has to stop. Moriarty, as has been said in both
the stories and on the TV series, is at the centre of a vast network of people,
and he’s clearly put measures in place to ensure that his work will continue
after his death. The end of this episode suggests that when we ever do get a
fourth season (current projections put it in 2017, but we can’t be sure), it’ll
focus on Moriarty’s network again.

The theme of both the Moriarty story and
the feminism angle are both metaphors for the series itself. The stories of
Sherlock Holmes are very much rooted in their time, from the Victorian era to
1914, where Holmes and Watson meet for the last time in “His Last Bow” and
Holmes mentions that a terrible wind is blowing from the east, signaling the
First World War. And yet, just as Moriarty and Amelia Ricoletti appear to have
risen from the dead, so has Sherlock, time after time. Often in his Victorian
cape and deerstalker, but in the case of Sherlock,
by rooting the story in the 21st century they show just how ahead of its time
these stories were, and how ahead of his time Holmes was. At the end of the
episode, as we flip back to the Victorian era one last time, Sherlock stands at
the window of 221B Baker Street, and says, “I’ve always known I’m a man out of
his time.” The BBC adaptation once again proves its brilliance in this final
moment, as the camera pulls back and we see the Victorian Sherlock standing in
the window, looking out over a 21st century street scene of cars and people
rushing by holding smartphones. The stories of Sherlock Holmes should be set in the modern era, because
the stories themselves are out of their time.

In the Victorian era, women had very few
rights at all. Now, in the 21st century, they’re still searching for equality
in pay and rights, and are still finding an imbalance of the sexes. By setting
part of this episode back in its original Victorian setting, Sherlock not only demonstrates just how
far we’ve come — note how Mary is essential to the gang in the present day, but
John doesn’t even notice her coming and going in 1895 — but how far we
still have to go — both Molly Hooper and Janine step forward from the secret
society of women, reminding us of how unfairly both women were treated by Sherlock.

“The Abominable Bride” is a superb episode
of television, and reminds us once again of how much we miss this show when
it’s not on. It took a time-traveling, mind-bending episode and turned
everything on its head, and yet, as Moffat and Gatiss always do, they take the
various strands spread throughout the episode and tie them together by the end.
Sherlock thought he’d rid himself of Moriarty, but the villain’s taunts have
stuck in Sherlock’s head, and no matter how many times he tries to rid himself of
them, Moriarty keeps popping back, alive but insane within Sherlock’s mind
palace. Similarly, in the Victorian era, just when a male-centric society
thought it could keep women down, those women found a way to rise from the dead
and blow a hole through the chauvinism that sought to silence them. And with
this episode, perhaps Moffat and Gatiss have finally found a way to silence
anyone who suggests that the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle do not have a place
in the 21st century.

John, lighting a candle: “Little use us
standing here in the dark. After all, this is
the 19th century.”

Sherlock saying the case is “so blindingly
obvious even Lestrade could work it out.”

Sherlock: Have you put on weight?

Mycroft: You saw me only yesterday. Does
that seem possible?

Sherlock: No.
Mycroft: Yet here I am, increased.

[I think Mark Gatiss as Mycroft is some of
the most perfect casting on television.]

Moriarty’s appearance. While the other
characters have reverted to their Victorian counterparts, Moriarty stays just
as loony as he is in the 21st century version. Amazing.

John: You’re Sherlock Holmes, wear the
bloody hat.

Sherlock: Amelia Ricoletti, I need to know
where she was buried.

Mycroft: What, 120 years ago? That would
take weeks to find, if those records even exist. Even with my resources—

Mary (typing on her phone): Got it.

Things
to Note:

Doyle is famous for changing small details
from story to story, mostly due to the fact he wrote them all so quickly. In A Study in Scarlet Watson says he was
shot in the shoulder, yet in A Sign of
Four he says he was shot in the leg. In this episode we see him clearly
shot in the shoulder, yet when he returns to London he’s walking with a cane,
which is a clever nod to Doyle’s inconsistency.

As John’s voiceover mentions some cases
that are “too sensitive to recount,” we see a close-up of a knife stuck into a
pile of letters. I’m assuming that’s from “The Adventure of Charles Augustus
Milverton,” the blackmailer who used letters as weapons (he became Charles
Augustus Magnusson in “His Last Vow”), but in the Doyle story the letters were all
burned, so it’s not clear if that’s what it’s supposed to be. However, given
that this is Sherlock’s mind palace, and the story of Magnusson just happened, it would probably be on
the forefront of his mind.

The drawing on the wall of 221B — which,
from a distance, looks like a skull — is actually the illustration that
accompanied Doyle’s story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which was about the one and
only Irene Adler.

When John and Sherlock enter 221B and a
woman is standing in the room entirely dressed in black and veiled, it’s a
reference to “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” the antepenultimate story in
Doyle’s Holmesian canon, where a woman meets with Holmes and Watson and her
face is so mutilated she must keep it veiled at all times. This story features
my favourite opening of all the stories, where Watson issues a threat to one of
his readers in the first paragraph that’s hysterically funny.

Sherlock says he knew it was Lestrade at
the door because his step was different than Gregson’s and Jones’s — these are
two other detectives that were often used in Doyle’s stories.

Ricoletti walks with a limp, which
indicates the “club-foot” mentioned in the story.

Sherlock speaks to an empty chair,
addressing John. In the books Watson said he could leave the room and let
Holmes speak to a bedpost for all the feedback Holmes ever demanded of him,
which was none.

The “Come at once, if convenient” telegram,
which has been used once before as a text message on the show, comes from “The
Adventure of the Creeping Man.” As always, it’s not really urgent.

While the sign language scene at the Diogenes
Club is hilarious, it’s not in keeping at all with what the Diogenes Club
represents in the books. The reason no one speaks at the club is because the
members are all extreme introverts who do not want to engage with other people.
They hang out in the Diogenes Club behind their books and newspapers,
comfortable in the knowledge that no one will attempt to talk to or communicate
with them in any way. If sign language were allowed in the club so they could
communicate with one another, it would entirely undermine the whole meaning of
the club. (But I loved this scene anyway.)

The discussion that John and Sherlock have
on the train about ghosts are from both “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”
and The Hound of the Baskervilles,
where, in both instances, Holmes immediately dismisses the possibility of
supernatural beings.

Sherlock says “The game is afoot!” which is
what Holmes always says in the book. In the show to this point, he’s always
said, “The game is on!”

The painting in Mycroft’s room is “The
Reichenbach Falls,” which was given to Sherlock as a gift in a previous
episode, and foreshadows that the final room in Sherlock’s mind palace will be
the falls themselves.

In the mind palace of Victorian London, the
obese Mycroft asks for Sherlock’s drug list, and Sherlock doesn’t hand it over,
saying instead that he’s not finished yet. Tying the two brothers together in
this list — and showing that the fat Mycroft isn’t actually an homage to the
original literary version, but instead what Mycroft looks like in Sherlock’s
head — hints to the viewer that perhaps Sherlock isn’t the only OCD brother.
Could Mycroft be a bulimic? Or, more plausibly, is Sherlock simply projecting
his own addictions onto a brother who is constantly needling him about them by
turning Mycroft into an equally addictive personality in his mind palace out of
spite?

When Mycroft picks up the ripped-up pieces
of Sherlock’s list, he sticks them in his notebook. You can see “Redbeard”
written at the top of the page, which is the name of Sherlock’s childhood dog,
the one kind and loving thing that resides in Sherlock’s mind palace. Under it
is written 611174 and “Vernet”? The second one is easy: in “The Greek
Interpreter,” Sherlock claims that his mother’s stepbrother was the French
artist Vernet. If this is written under that number, perhaps Mycroft is
attempting to work out some piece of his genealogy with Sherlock. But what
could the number 611174 mean? Maybe the second and fourth ones aren’t ones at
all, but slashes, and it actually reads 6/1/74, which would be the 6th of
January, 1974. Sherlock was born on January 6, 1981, as we learned in a
previous episode. So what could this be referring to? Could Mycroft have the
same birthday? We know there’s a seven-year age difference between the two brothers,
so the difference in years is right, but would they have been born on the same
day of the year? Or is it possible he’s looking at the Victorian Sherlock, and
going back to 1874? It’s widely accepted that in the canon, Holmes’s birthday
is January 6, 1854, so this date would be his 20th birthday, but Sherlock’s
first case doesn’t happen until 1880. It’s unclear what exactly the number’s
referring to, but couched between “Redbeard” and “Vernet,” it appears to be of
a personal nature.

15 comments:

Yes! I saw an article just this morning that was called something like, "Easter Eggs in the Sherlock special" and they listed that dagger among them. Then someone commented on the article, "Dude, you just cribbed the special that happened in the theatre before the episode." ;) I'm assuming that special will be on the DVD (I hope!)

As ever, brilliant analysis, Nik! While I found the episode thoroughly enjoyable, I was a little underwhelmed by the storytelling as a whole, finding the through-line a bit cumbersome, and the last third of the story somewhat overburdened by subtext. Minor criticisms, though, and perhaps equally attributable to my flu and concoction of medicines!

One note on the costumes of the secret society/Twitterverse reaction. While you are no doubt quite right that the obvious connection to the KKK and the Five Pips is the surface allusion, the use of such outfits is most often attributed to an era in the early 20th century long after this Victorian setting. It is unlikely that this group of women would have drawn their sartorial inspiration from a white supremacist society in America - particularly in Abolitionist England of the late 1800s. Robes and hoods have a far deeper European tradition to draw upon as inspiration for even this bloody-minded suffragist association.

In particular, I'm struck by the pointed headgear "capirote", which Wiki (ah, Wiki, We Sing Thy Praises ... While We Question Your Annotations) tells us was used in penitent religious ceremonies in Spain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote Religious orders throughout history with conical headgear are numerous, and this symbology would have been a more likely inspiration for our Purple Meanies.

I was glad that the switch in time periods ended up playing a part in the overall continuity of the series. (Of course it would’ve been just fine as a lark, too.) Like Humanebean, I’m afraid that the nested realities got a bit cumbersome towards the end for my tastes, in particular how Sherlock went to dig up the Abominable Bride’s grave in the present day oh wait no he didn’t that’s part of his mind-palace construction he’s still on the plane newly waking up now, but a bit cleverer than necessary is preferable to dull — plus, the exchange in that scene between John and Mary quoted above was worth the price of admission virtually by itself. The Interweb hive-mind seems to have come down on the episode as a water-treading placeholder trifle featuring Sherlock at his most insufferable, most egregiously when he mansplains the secret society of suffragettes, apparently forgetting that it’s taking place in Sherlock’s head, so I’m happy that you enjoyed it and even happier that it prompted a nice long post. I greatly enjoyed such visual tricks as the parlor opening onto the scenes as Sherlock described them and the insight offered by the contrast between/among the “reality” of the show, the stories written about Sherlock as they exist within that reality and within ours, the mind-palace versions of the characters, and permutations thereof.

We saw the show on TV and in the theater, and agree, completely brilliant and we were totally fish-hooked about it being completely out of the storyline. That said, I do have a beef with whomever wrote the trivia questions on the screen before the movie. One question asked, what song played on Moriarty's phone when it rang when he and Sherlock were facing each other down at the pool at the end of "The Blind Baker." So many things are wrong with that question I can't see how it passed proofreading. It couldn't have been from anyone connected to the show, they are entirely too detail focused for such an error. Has anyone else mentioned it?

I loved TAB and am still in the process of analyzing the complex and intriguing components of the plot. There is noticeable emphasis on Sherlock's sexuality in this 'episode,' as well as making it clear that Sherlock's nemesis, Moriarty, is gay (re his possessive, lustful and 'obscene' attentions to Sherlock in his mind palace). Can you contribute your thoughts on the subject of sexuality in TAB, please?

And know that I greatly enjoyed your book (an indispensable reference for Sherlock fans), and was so happy to find your TAB review!

Thanks in advance.... (BTW, I'm going 'anonymous' because of my work situation.)

Finally got a chance to watch this. Loved it, and of course rushed right over here to get your thoughts. Just like 'Investigating Sherlock' this write-up was great insight and entertainment; and made me revisit the book's "From ACD To BBC," still my favorite bits.

One thing that popped out at me in 'Abominable Bride' that I haven't seen mentioned is the first Establish of 221B; right between Watson & "Blue Carbuncle's" exchange and introducing Mrs. Hudson. We come off the white-on-black Baker Street sign with the Red W to the street itself, all wonderfully period. Well, it felt just like the opening of the Granada Television / Jeremy Brett series, MUSIC CUE AND ALL. Had to be an homage, right?

Mostly, I write about television, and with this being the home of the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, a lot of that television is Joss Whedon-related (when it's not about Lost). Stick around if you love Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Sherlock, Lost, BtVS, Doctor Who, or anything on HBO.

About Me

I've published companion guides to Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Alias, and Lost through ECW Press, and my latest book is "Finding Lost — Season Six: The Unofficial Guide." Currently, I love Revenge, Community, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead... actually, pretty much everything on HBO or AMC.

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Welcome to the home of the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, where every Tuesday night we convened to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer from season 1 to the end. I was joined by over 25 guest commentators and Buffy scholars who helped me lead you through the watch, offering non-spoilery discussion for the new watchers as well as spoiler-filled discussions for the rewatchers. The entire Rewatch can be found in the archives here, listed by week and contributor. Go here for the full 2011 schedule, and here to see the list of amazing contributors. And be sure to pick up my book, Bite Me, a complete episode by episode guide to the series!